355147 - new Yahoo mail beta: Firefox is running but not responding.

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Robert Riches]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.7) Gecko/20060919 Firefox/1.5.0.7
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.7) Gecko/20060919 Firefox/1.5.0.7

After switching to the new Yahoo Mail beta (October, 2006), starting several Firefox windows in succession causes Firefox to quite responding, and it fails to open some of the windows.


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Switch a Yahoo Mail account to use the new beta.
2. Run the following commands from a shell:

firefox 'http://www.mapquest.com' &
sleep 1
firefox 'http://www.google.com' &
sleep 1
firefox 'http://mail.yahoo.com' &
sleep 1
firefox 'http://mandrivaclub.com' &
sleep 1
firefox 'http://wwwnew.mandriva.com/security/advisories?dis=2006.0' &
sleep 1
firefox 'http://qa.mandriva.com/show_bug.cgi?id=21226' &
sleep 1
firefox 'http://qa.mandriva.com/show_bug.cgi?id=21227' &
sleep 1
firefox 'http://qa.mandriva.com/show_bug.cgi?id=21228' &
sleep 1
firefox 'http://qa.mandriva.com/show_bug.cgi?id=17817' &
sleep 1
firefox 'http://qa.mandriva.com/show_bug.cgi?id=24145' &
sleep 1
firefox 'http://qa.mandriva.com/show_bug.cgi?id=24633' &
sleep 1
firefox 'http://forum.mandrivaclub.com/viewtopic.php?p=213901' &
sleep 1
firefox 'http://forum.mandrivaclub.com/viewtopic.php?p=238042' &
sleep 1
firefox 'https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=335551' &
sleep 1
firefox 'https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=354241' &

3. Wait for the dialog box to come up stating Firefox failed to open some of the browser windows.

Actual Results:  
At least one, usually about three, dialog boxes pop up:

Firefox is already running, but is not responding.  To open a new window, you must first close the existing Firefox process, or restart your system.

For each instance of the dialog box, one of the requested windows has failed to come up.


Expected Results:  
Firefox should open the requested windows without hanging on Yahoo's new animated eye candy.


This is observed on a fairly fast system, Pentium 4 "A" at 2.4GHz, 1GB RAM, ~1.5Mbit DSL internet service.

With the old Yahoo Mail system, the expected result is achieved with great reliability.  With the new Yahoo Mail beta, Yahoo's bloated animated eye candy gunk causes Yahoo to block and fail to open new windows, again with great reliability (at least the several times I tried it).

Switching back to Yahoo's old mail system works around the symptom.

Comment 1

[Steve England [:stevee]]

Reporter, do you still see this problem with the latest Firefox 2? If not, can you please close this bug as WORKSFORME. Thanks!

Comment 2

[Robert Riches]

My Linux distribution and release are still on Firefox 1.5, and I'm not able to switch to Firefox 2 at this time.

In addition to the original workaround of switching back to the old Yahoo mail system, I found that when the browser is already running 'firefox' command returns to the shell promptly, so I was able to eliminate the ampersand that put the command in background.  Along with improving my detection of whether the browser is already running, that has made the symptoms go away for me, even with Firefox 1.5.